The First Pictures of Roses. Part II

This is the oldest pictorial evidence of humanity’s love of roses. A fragment of fresco dating to the Bronze Age, painted by an artist working within the Minoan civilization in Crete (2000-1500BCE). It was discovered by the British archeologist Sir Arthur Evans, who began his excavations at Knossos in 1899. In this photo, you can see the roses top and bottom left.

Fresco technique involves the painting of colour pigments without a binding agent on still wet lime plaster, so that the paint is absorbed into the plaster and thereby fixed and protected from fading. The darker parts in the picture are hypothetical restorations not the original fresco, which can be made out in the more weathered and rough areas of the image. Due to the overzealous and botanically ignorant restorers hired by Evans, some of the extant images of roses got turned into six petalled flowers and were re-coloured yellowish pink. As a result, they have been variously named as Rosa persica, (which is a yellow rose),Rosa ricardii, or Rosa canina.

Fortunately, towards the lower left-hand side the restorers left one area unmodified, and in a faded area of the design we can name out the vague form of a rose with five overlapping petals in pale pink, which has been more convincingly named a Rosa pulverulenta, a wild rose that is still growing in western and central Crete.

Here is a detail:

And here is Rosa pulverulenta:

As you can see, this rose is indeed quite similar to Rosa canina, the Dog Rose:

Just what the Minoans thought of the rose we will never know. But during the Bronze Age in the Fertile Triangle (which today includes Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, the northeast and Nile valley regions of Egypt, the southeastern region of Turkey, and the western part of Iran), relatively complex societies developed which prospered through the use of advanced irrigation agriculture, and where there evolved a culture of flowers. Along with the domestication of cereal plants and animals, it seems roses were also cultivated, perhaps for the medicinal properties of the hips, to serve as hedges (the thorns kept out animals), or maybe just because they looked beautiful. The interest in domesticating the rose then spread westwards deeper into the Mediterranean region to encompass the Minoan civilization and the Mycenaeans of the Greek mainland. But along with practical and aesthetic uses, the symbolic value of the rose also spread. This will be the subject of my next post.